The term
WASP became associated with the
American upper class due to over-representation of WASPs in the upper echelons of society. Until the mid–20th century, industries such as banks, insurance, railroads, utilities, and manufacturing were dominated by WASPs. The
Founding Fathers of the United States were mostly educated, well-to-do, of
British ancestry, and Protestants. According to a study of the biographies of signers of the Declaration of Independence by
Caroline Robbins: The Signers came for the most part from an educated elite, were residents of older settlements, and belonged with a few exceptions to a moderately well-to-do class representing only a fraction of the population. Native or born overseas, they were of British stock and of the Protestant faith. Catholics in the Northeast and the Midwest—mostly immigrants and their descendants from
Ireland and
Germany as well as southern and eastern Europe—came to dominate
Democratic Party politics in big cities through the ward
boss system. Catholic politicians were often the target of WASP political hostility. Political scientist
Eric Kaufmann argues that "the 1920s marked the high tide of WASP control". In 1965, Canadian sociologist John Porter, in
The Vertical Mosaic, argued that
British origins were disproportionately represented in the higher echelons of Canadian class, income, political power, the clergy, the media, etc. However, more recently, Canadian scholars have traced the decline of the WASP elite. Self-imposed diversity incentives opened the country's most elite schools. The
GI Bill brought higher education to new ethnic arrivals, who found middle class jobs in the postwar economic expansion. Nevertheless, white Protestants remain influential in the country's cultural, political, and economic elite. Scholars typically agree that the group's influence has waned since 1945, with the growing influence of other ethnic groups. The political scientist Theodore P. Wright Jr., argues that while the Anglo ethnicity of the U.S. presidents from
Richard Nixon through
George W. Bush is evidence for the continued cultural dominance of WASPs, assimilation and social mobility, along with the ambiguity of the term, has led the WASP class to survive only by "incorporating other groups [so] that it is no longer the same group" that existed in the mid-20th century. Very few Jewish lawyers were hired by White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ("WASP") upscale
white-shoe law firms, but they started their own. The WASP dominance in law ended when a number of major Jewish law firms attained elite status in dealing with top-ranked corporations. Most white-shoe firms also excluded Roman Catholics. As late as 1950 there was not a single large Jewish law firm in New York City. However, by 1965 six of the 20 largest firms were Jewish; by 1980 four of the ten largest were Jewish. Two famous confrontations signifying a decline in WASP dominance were the 1952 Senate election in Massachusetts, in which
John F. Kennedy, a Catholic of Irish descent, defeated WASP
Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., and the 1964 challenge by Arizona Senator
Barry Goldwater—an
Episcopalian who had solid WASP credentials through his mother, but whose father was Jewish, and was seen by some as part of the Jewish community—to
Nelson Rockefeller and the Eastern Republican establishment, which led to the liberal
Rockefeller Republican wing of the party being marginalized by the 1980s, overwhelmed by the dominance of Southern and Western conservatives. However, asking "Is the WASP leader a dying breed?", journalist Nina Strochlic in 2012 pointed to eleven WASP top politicians, ending with Republicans
George H. W. Bush, elected in 1988, his son George W. Bush, elected in 2000 and 2004, and
John McCain, who was nominated but defeated in 2008.
Mary Kenny argues that
Barack Obama, although famous as the first Black president, exemplifies highly controlled "unemotional delivery" and "rational detachment" characteristic of WASP personality traits. Indeed, he attended upper class schools such as Columbia and Harvard, and was raised by his WASP mother
Ann Dunham and
the Dunham grandparents in a
family that dates to
Jonathan Singletary Dunham, born in Massachusetts in 1640. Inderjeet Parmar and Mark Ledwidge argue that Obama pursued a typically WASP-inspired foreign policy of liberal internationalism. In the 1970s, a
Fortune magazine study found one-in-five of the country's largest businesses and one-in-three of its largest banks was run by an Episcopalian. Since the 1960s, an increasing number of non-WASP justices have been appointed to the Court. From 2010 to 2017, the Court had no Protestant members, until the appointment of
Neil Gorsuch in 2017. The
University of California, Berkeley, once a WASP stronghold, has changed radically: only 30% of its undergraduates in 2007 were of European origin (including WASPs and all other Europeans), and 63% of undergraduates at the university were from immigrant families (where at least one parent was an immigrant), especially Asian. Once also a WASP bastion, as of 2010 Harvard University enrolled 9,289
non-Hispanic white students (44%, of which approximately 30% were Jewish), 2,658
Asian American students (13%), 1,239
Hispanic students (6%), and 1,198
African American students (6%). A significant shift of American economic activity toward the
Sun Belt during the latter part of the 20th century and an increasingly globalized economy have also contributed to the decline in power held by Northeastern WASPs. James D. Davidson et al. argued in 1995 that while WASPs were no longer solitary among the American elite, members of the Patrician class remained markedly prevalent within the current power structure. Other analysts have argued that the extent of the decrease in WASP dominance has been overstated. In response to increasing claims of fading WASP dominance, Davidson, using data on American elites in political and economic spheres, concluded in 1994 that, while the WASP and Protestant establishment had lost some of its earlier prominence, WASPs and Protestants were still vastly overrepresented among America's elite. In August 2012 the
New York Times, reviewed the religion of the fifteen top national leaders: the presidential and vice-presidential nominees, the Supreme Court justices, the House Speaker, and the Senate majority leader. There were nine Catholics (six justices, both vice-presidential candidates, and the Speaker), three Jews (all from the Supreme Court), two Mormons (including the Republican presidential nominee
Mitt Romney) and one African-American Protestant (incumbent President Barack Obama). There were no white Protestants.
Hostile epithet In the 21st century,
WASP is often applied as a derogatory label to those with
social privilege who are perceived to be snobbish and exclusive, such as being members of restrictive private social clubs. Kevin M. Schultz stated in 2010 that WASP is "a much-maligned class identity....Today, it signifies an elitist snoot." However, others have defended WASP hegemony in the United States. According to
Richard Brookhiser the "uptight, bland, and elitist" stereotype obscures the "classic WASP ideals of industry, public service, family duty, and conscience to revitalize the nation." Likewise, conservative writer
Joseph Epstein suggested that the United States was better off with a WASP ruling class, which he views as now being ruled by an ethnically diverse elite, which he describes as the "self-involved, over-schooled products of modern meritocracy". ==In media==